Chapter Text
It's late.
It's late enough that someone possessing the willpower to be up at this hour might think they're living inside of an expertly-illustrated house inside of an even more expertly-illustrated painting when they look out their bedroom window due to how pitch-black it is outside.
The said painting would portray a peaceful night landscape; inky black sky, not a trace of light crossing that wide expanse high, high, high above a grassy field. The moon would be hung high somewhere among the stars, stars illustrated by the artist flicking their thumb through a paint-doused brush they held above the canvas. Two boys, side by side, lay sprawled out upon the grass– one with dazzling violet hair and the other with silvery locks tousled from the other boy’s lingering touches.
The painting would sell high, maybe a couple hundred dollars. Maybe thousands , even, depending on the desperation of the buyer. It would be worth a significant amount, but it could never be worth more than the grey-haired boy to the other.
“ Reo, I’m sleepy,” Nagi whines, shifting onto his side to pout at Reo.
Reo just chuckles in a way he hopes comes off as playful and not as fond as it came out, then swallows the lump in his throat that Nagi’s painfully endearing child-like antics raised.
He exhales softly and puts on a jocular grin.
He can’t bring himself to keep it.
It melts into a soft, affectionate smile, but he nudges Nagi with his elbow anyway. “C’mon, Sei, you were the one who wanted to show me the sky in the first place!”
Whether he was teasing Nagi or not, Reo was glad that he was brought here. Ego Jinpachi, after the implacable pleas of the Blue Lock teenagers, mercifully allowed them to take the weekend off after their last match, and Nagi decided to bring Reo along to a rather simple-looking grassy plain near his house.
“Let’s watch the sky at night.”
Reo blinks. What?
“Huh?” he asks after a moment.
Nagi blinks, too, then chooses to restate his proposition.
“Do you want to look at the stars tonight?” he asks this time.
Ah. Well, if that's what he means, Reo might as well give in to the question his brain is screaming at him to make sure gets confirmed. “… Just you and me?”
Nagi nods. “Yeah. ‘S too much of a hassle to invite the others.”
Reo huffs internally. Of course, it’s because it’d be a hassle. Whatever, he’ll take what he can get.
Externally, after realizing that this sounds an awful lot like a date, Reo finds a soft smile had made its way onto his face. “… Yeah. I’d lov– err, I’d like to.”
Embarrassed at the word he almost let slip, he turned his rapidly-flushing cheek to the other side in an attempt to avoid Nagi’s gaze.
Ever the nonchalant one in their friend(?)ship, Nagi nodded again. “Yay,” he said, although sounding quite unenthusiastic.
Yay, indeed, Nagi.
Nagi’s pout deepens, and Reo is all-too-familiar with the dull ache in his chest that arises from his heartstrings getting tugged at by Nagi’s stupidly adorable actions. He hates how much he loves that boy. “I know that, but it’s three in the morning, and I’ve never been up this late before…”
Lies.
“Yes, you have, Nagi. When we first met, you told me you used to sleep at six in the morning and wake up at four in the afternoon,” Reo counters with a small smirk and a raised eyebrow, and hopes it isn’t suspicious that he remembers such small details from their first meeting years ago.
Nagi huffs and turns back around, now ignoring Reo and staring at the moon with narrowed gray eyes like a petulant child.
Reo is a weak, weak man, because his expression immediately drops as soon as he realizes he’s being ignored, and he hurriedly scoots closer to the other boy.
“I’m sorry, Sei! I was just kidding!” he tries to reason, purple eyes widening and locked on Nagi’s as he tries to get him to quit the childish silent treatment.
After about a minute of pleading (Reo was terribly down bad), he realized that Nagi wasn’t going to stop this childish act of defiance. Reo let out a huff of his own, turned around himself, and crossed his arms against his chest with a frown. Nagi was truly just a big baby. Why does Reo love him so much?
A few silent, agonizing seconds pass by, until Reo eventually feels a finger tap at his shoulder. He turns around quickly, his eyes gleaming as he geared up to tease the other until he catches note of the regret laced in those captivating silver eyes. Reo’s face softened instantly.
“Reo… isn’t really mad, is he?” Nagi asks slowly, almost tentatively, his eyes pointedly avoiding Reo’s. He seemed to be nervous , even, chewing his bottom lip as he waited for a response.
The dullness in Reo's chest sharpens into a sort of clawing directly at his heart, clawing by something with sharp nails and a ravenous craving for the taste of the organ. In all honesty, if there really was a beast scratching at his heart, he wouldn’t put up a fight for it if it meant he’d be free from the endless cycle of hope, defeat, misery, repeat . He’s tired of this, honestly. Tired of thinking that maybe, maybe Nagi does love him back, only to have this very idea ripped to shreds and squashed underneath the beasts’ feet, along with his heart.
Reo feels as if his heart is a sort of patchwork, constantly falling apart and constantly getting sewn back together by a needle and a long thread of hope, only to fall apart again immediately after. He doesn’t remember the last time his heart was clean ; no wishful thread laced through the muscle, no “hope” keeping it together. Doesn’t remember when the thing that kept his heart together was his cellular composition, not a boy. He wishes the beast would just take his heart already.
“No,” Reo says simply, as voicing these thoughts would be too much of a hassle. “I’m not mad.”
‘I just wanted to get revenge,’ he thinks of saying just to tease the boy, but he thinks better of it. Twisted as it is, Reo likes the mood right now. He doesn’t want to ruin it by saying something dumb this time, like he always does.
Reo doesn’t want to let hope fester its way inside of him right now. He can’t, he won’t . But right now, with Nagi’s heavily relieved expression and soft exhale of breath as he confirmed Reo wasn’t upset with him, he embraced the feeling of that familiar needle and thread sewing up his bleeding heart.